FX Experience Has Gone Read-Only

I've been maintaining FX Experience for a really long time now, and I love hearing from people who enjoy my weekly links roundup. One thing I've noticed recently is that maintaining two sites (FX Experience and JonathanGiles.net) takes more time than ideal, and splits the audience up. Therefore, FX Experience will become read-only for new blog posts, but weekly posts will continue to be published on JonathanGiles.net. If you follow @FXExperience on Twitter, I suggest you also follow @JonathanGiles. This is not the end - just a consolidation of my online presence to make my life a little easier!

One of the big features I’ve known people have wanted for a long time (hey, I’ve wanted it too!) is support for returning a TableView back to its original, unsorted state after being sorted by the end user. In general the user interaction goes something like this:

Click on the same column header again. Everything sorts in descending order. We’re on a roll here!

Click on the same column again. The sort arrow disappears, and…….nothing 🙁

Of course, what should happen here is that the order of the items in the table should be reset back to their original order, from before the user ever clicked on anything. If you step behind the curtains with me for the briefest of moments, you’ll realise that the only way we can really do this is to of course keep a copy of the list in its original state (or a list of all the changes to the original list, such that we can unwind the changes later on). I never really wanted to do this, as you’re just setting yourself up for failure / pain / bugs / etc. What I always wanted to do was follow the wonderful GlazedLists approach from the Swing days, where the collections themselves became smarter, and the TableView remained mostly* inconsiderate of the type of collection given to it.(more…)

One of the teams working on JavaFX is located in Prague. This team is responsible for many things, including the base scenegraph API, layout, core libraries, animation, and ports to some mobile devices. They have now started up a team blog to publish details of their work. The first post comes from Martin Sladecek, who is currently spending some of his time working on optimising and bug fixing the JavaFX layout APIs. His post is about the peculiarities of JavaFX layout.

We put together a demo that shows what JavaFX can do on a RaspberryPi running fill 1080p HD on a TV using 5 way navigation(Arrows + Select). I hope you enjoy it, we had a lot of fun making it.

The first section of the video is a real recording direct of the HDMI output of the Raspberry Pi. So you can see the raw performance of the device, though video capture was limited to 30fps when the Pi was rendering at 60fps much of the time. The second section is a demo of how SceneBuilder could be used to build one of the demos. In all the menus we show the little overlay of arrow keys in top right corner so you can see how the menu is being navigated.

There are 4 separate menu demos:

The first menu is a classic 2D menu system with a cool 2.5D section chooser.

This is a cool vector 2D animated menu with a fun visual style. Playing with the idea of rotation.

This is a cartoon retro style 3D menu showing 3D extruded text and 3D modeled TVs. The text and TVs were created in Cheetah 3D and exported as OBJ then imported using the OBJ importer available in the open source 3D Viewer sample app. In this demo and the next we have random animated lighting in and the ability to spin the 3D model with the <- and -> arrow keys so that the user can get a feeling for it being real time rendered 3D rather than video of offline rendered content.

This was a way out 3D menu featuring DukeBot who was a early alternative design for the Java Duke mascot that did not get chosen. He was modeled and animated by John Yoon in Maya and we then imported the Maya ASCII file directly with all animation into JavaFX. The code for this menu is pretty tiny as its mostly working off the imported Maya file. The Maya importer is also open source and in the 3D Viewer sample app.

Its mostly running on the shipping EA of JavaFX 8 Embedded we prototyped a couple changes to the platform that we are working on making them real and I hope they will make it into 8 but not sure yet if we will have time. The changes are some performance improvements to how we draw into frame buffer, also the ability to draw JavaFX with transparent background on a hardware layer over hardware decoded video.